Bloody Mary's back yard

A real-life spin around Bora Bora, South Pacific's fantasy island

November 07, 2004|By Toni Stroud, Tribune staff reporter.

BORA BORA, French Polynesia — Sandy backed up the 4X4 for a better look. There, on the other side of the ditch, under the bower of an overgrown bush, in a pen of painfully close quarters, an enormous pig was snoozing.

We were nearing the end of our circle-island tour, and he--Sandy's a he--wanted to show us as much as possible about everyday life on Bora Bora. That's why we were on this neighborhood/backwoods road, looking for pigpens and, a bit later, pausing quietly before tin-roofed houses with family gravesites in shady front yards because there are no cemeteries in this paradise.

Once he'd satisfied himself that we'd gotten the gist of rural living on this speck of the Tahitian islands chain in the South Pacific, Sandy stretched himself up through the 4X4's topless roof frame, motor still running, to pluck a few grapefruits from someone's overburdened tree. We bypassed a tangle of other trees--breadfruit, avocado, banana--some hosting beehives, others competing with tall stalks of marijuana for space. Minutes later we were back on Bora Bora's lone highway--if you can see your way clear to calling the 19.26 miles of two-lane blacktop that circle the 11-square-mile island a highway.

Bora Bora has been here for millions of years--between 3 and 4 million it's estimated. It has been inhabited by Polynesians for some 12 centuries and governed by France since the mid-1800s. But it really wasn't on the map until the American military build-up during World War II. And it didn't arrive, I mean really, really arrive, until people like Cameron Diaz and Brendan Fraser started eating fish 'n' chips and tortilla pies at Bloody Mary's, an American-style hamburger bar with sand piles for flooring.

As volcanic formations go, Bora Bora is one of the world's most comely. As islands go, same thing. Here, the deep greens of a jagged land separate sea and sky. A necklace of coral divides the multi-toned turquoise of the lagoon from the indigo of the South Pacific. Painterly clouds in slate blue and apricot catch on the mountaintops, and throughout the day the sunlight changes, changes, changes the colors of everything it touches.

The point of the 4X4 safari is to appreciate all that beauty from many angles. So Sandy was soon steering off the blacktop and driving up, up a bone-jarring, mud-caked, tire-spinning mountain route--who said this was aroad?--bound for a devil's backbone of a mountain ridge set with a pair of now rusting-and-graffiti-slathered cannons. The artillery was left behind by the very American GIs who had hauled it up the mountain piece by piece in the first place, Sandy said, and assembled the parts on the spot at the island's most strategic locations.

Back then, some of the gun emplacements covered the American military's just-built air strip. Today that same scrap of pavement is still Bora Bora's only airport. Other guns, for example, protected places like Teavanui Pass, the island's only navigable channel through the surrounding coral reefs. Today the channel is used by cruise ships, which drop anchor in the lagoon's Povai Bay.

For all its defenses 60 years ago, Bora Bora is surprisingly free of them these days. In an age when air passengers are subjected to a host of security measures elsewhere in the world, flights between Bora Bora and Tahiti or Moorea are a trip in themselves--back in time to how air travel used to be: no police force, no metal detectors, no bag swipes, no probing.

Tahiti's inter-island terminals--scarcely bigger than convenience stores--are open-air. And flights in and out of Bora Bora are a reminder of what window seats are for: views spectacular, if fleeting. What can be seen on a tour lasts longer and comes with more history, and better snacks.

The American cannons were never fired in battle, but their defensive positions make memorable picnicking. When we, that is to say three French couples and I, the lone American, made it up to the guns that once guarded the channel, Sandy served the just-plucked grapefruits informally: on the hood of the 4X4, accompanied by machete-carved pineapple.

From there, we looked down the mountain's northern slope to the Fare Piti dock, reportedly another GI leftover still in use, jutting into Faanui Bay. Turning the other direction, we looked down its southern slope to see the village of Vaitape, the ship channel, a cruise ship in Povai Bay and several motus; that's the name given to the tiny, baby islands inside the reef.

Sandy said it was on one of these motus that the science of cultured black pearls was perfected. The cottage industry is now one of the Tahitian islands' few sources of income. Lots of jewelry shops here are ready to explain how it's done.

But the motus serve other purposes. As if Bora Bora itself weren't exotic enough, many of the hotels offer picnic outings to the motus for those who want to spend a day living out a "deserted island" fantasy--without hazarding a shipwreck.